than one?
CHILDREN There is only one God, Mr Neish.
NEISH Only one God…one truth. One truth to learn.
(Bar room ambience.)
MCQUARRIE Learn? Sixty unhappy brats in a single cold classroom, all ages, all abilities! They cannot learn in an Artisan School as they understand the word at the University. One can thrash some rudimentary repetitions into them! But teach? Hardly! And why teach them anything at all if they can only learn to despise their lot in life? When they can be contented, ignorant servants in agriculture, industry and domestic service!
NEISH Euan is not going to be a servant! That is why…
MCQUARRIE Some may end in prison or the army, and a little beating from us will accustom them to that life too. And for the rest, let us pass the time for them and for ourselves as pleasantly as maybe.
NEISH If they are fated to bleach and spin and weave, it is an accident of history and geography. But is it not true that every advance in human history has come from those who broke the bounds of necessity? Should we not take account of the exceptional?
MCQUARRIE You? For example…
NEISH Me? We’re not talking about me…
MCQUARRIE Are we not, though? Farmtoun boy made good? Durisdeer…was that not yer teacher’s name?
NEISH We are talking about our pupil. Euan MacBride.
MCQUARRIE If you say so…
NEISH He is of exceptional ability and intelligence, you can see that. But unless he has help from you and me, then yes…it may be his destiny to submit to a working life of severity and poverty…but more likely, given his energy and intelligence, crime…a life of crime…
MCQUARRIE Are we saving our citizens from a master criminal now?
NEISH becomes uncomfortably aware of their conversation being listened to, and that the listeners think he’s being naïve.
NEISH We are intervening in the life of a single child…a single child who stands for many…whose lives are dictated to them from slum childhood to slum solitude and death as absolutely as if they were subjects of any Satrap.
MCQUARRIE (To the enjoyment of the listeners.) Control yourself, Mr Neish! Satraps and master criminals, is it? He seems a soulful wee chap to me…especially given the family of Neanderthals he springs from…
NEISH (Insisting against the crowd.) Should we not try to do right by him?
MCQUARRIE Do right? Possibly! The price for my assistance is the truth.
NEISH The truth?
MCQUARRIE Are you sure…when you think of young Master MacBride …that you’re not thinking of yourself at a similar age…plucked from similar obscurity by your own village domine? Up from rural ignorance to the University of Dundee. Years of struggle, study…of learning the manners and voices of a gentleman!
NEISH Aye. Mainners you were born wi...raised wi…I had to claw them oot ae the earth…
MCQUARRIE Like potatoes! And yet here we are…colleagues. You raised from your rural idiocy to the dizzy heights of a parochial schoolteacher…and me fallen from on high to exactly the same status. That you are here with me is testament to your years of industry…That I am here with you…is testament to my indolence and failure. Which of us is more poisoned with frustrated ambition? Me or you?
NEISH Will you help me with Euan MacBride? Will you support me with the headmaster? No matter what you think my motivations are?
MCQUARRIE You must not teach him to fly higher than his wings are made for. I hope you’ll not regret your ambition, like Daedalus…watching your Icarus fall into the Tay…
(The listeners laugh. NEISH silences them with the catechism.)
NEISH Does God know all things?
CHILDREN Yes; nothing can be hid from God, Mr Neish.
NEISH Nothing can be hid from God!
(Confessing, his hand touching his black armband.)
All right. It’s true. Without Mr Durisdeer, I would never have been ambitious. I would never have fallen into …this hatred…and disappointment.
(Euan steps forward to sit at a desk for solo instruction.)
But Euan MacBride…a faither lost at sea…a mither subsisting on charity…his family living in a single room with another family similarly indigent…against all odds, all expectation…he has a spark of…possibility. He has not an ounce of privilege…but merr ability…merr promise than I ever had.
Perhaps his best outcome will be as paltry as ma ain…But wi’oot my help…whatever hope he has will come to nothing. And whatever God in his heaven knows of me and my motivation…it is still the right thing to do.
One child at a time. We can save the world one child at a time.
(As he recites, the passengers slowly join in, as they did in the catechism.)
Amo, Amas, Amat. Amamis, Amatis, Amant.
I love, you love, he loves, we love. You love, they love
Discam Disces Discet Discemus Disceti Discent
I will learn, you will learn, he will learn, we will learn, you will learn…they will learn.
We will deserve it.
PASSENGERS We will deserve it.
(He has his audience listening to him now. Reaching the climax of his story.)
It took a year. A year of tuition and expense to myself…but Euan was ready…and on Friday morning a week ago, I closed off and heated a room for him to come and sit the scholarship exam…I had paid his entrance fee as the governors of the school would not…I had taken a day off work…officially…I had brought Professor Taft of the University…my old tutor… to conduct the examination in person. Latin. History. Geography. Theology and Moral Thought.
And we sat together. The Professor and I. As Nine O’Clock struck…as a minute went by…two minutes….five….and an awful certainty afflicted me…
(He hurries to ask at the school office.)
I went, I asked, and I discovered what I should have known. Euan had not come to school that morning. Yesterday, in the last lesson of the day. McQuarrie had beaten him. Beaten him savagely like a slave. Today…Euan had not come to school. God knows if he would ever come back.
I’d lost him.
I was stunned…staggered…and without forethought, I found myself in McQuarrie’s class room…where he was teaching the catechism.
(The children/listeners are now hostile to MCQUARRIE.)
MCQUARRIE What did God give Adam and Eve besides bodies?
CHILDREN
